Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Seventeen - Kaboom

“Samurai are a fine deterrent, and there’s no denying that they’ll kill more xenos than any properly organised army once they get going, but holy shit are they ever hard to work with.

Do you have any idea how many times I had to walk over to a samurai, hat in hand, and politely ask them not to commit war crimes at danger-close proximity to my troops?”

--Live Open-Broadcast message from US Army General to Samurai near the Oklahoma incursion, 2029

***

I inspected the disk for a moment. There was a timer on it with a couple of buttons to adjust it. “So, I press this, timer counts down, and then the bomb appears?” I asked.

Essentially, yes.

“Why not just give me the bomb?”

Because while the core of the explosive is activated by a fusion detonator, the majority of the explosive power comes from the hyper-dense explosives packed around the core. Those weigh in excess of one metric ton and would crush you and destroy Gomorrah’s upholstery if you were to summon it inside the Fury.

“If your mangled body stains my seats I will be very disappointed,” Gomorrah said.

“Alright, alright, hold your tits.” I scooted to the edge of the seat and grabbed the door handle. “I’m going to tap this and drop it, can you get us right on top of the hive?”

Gomorrah nodded and drove us around in a tight spiral, gaining height as we went.

“Myalis, how long should I set this for?”

The lower you are, the less time you’ll want to have on the timer. The explosive needs a moment to angle itself in the air and to fire its downwards thrusters to pierce into the ground.

“Got it,” Gomorrah said. She slowed us to a full stop, then shoved her foot down on a pedal which sent us shooting upwards. I glanced at the dash where I could see our height in metres rising, she slowed down when we were a kilometre or so over the hive. “Good enough?

Certainly.

I opened the door, glad for my helmet as a cool blast of wind buffeted the inside of the Fury. Leaning out over the side, I glanced way, way down. It wasn’t too hard to spot the opening in the forest where we thought the hive was. It was one of the only open spots in the forest.

I set the timer to three seconds, then held it out over the void.

“Hey, Gomorrah, you got anything witty to say?” I asked.

“Close the door, it’s getting cold?” she tried.

“I meant as like, a final fuck-off to the aliens.”

“I’m not really keen on witticisms,” she said.

I shrugged, tapped the timer with my thumb, then let it drop.

I looked at the disk drop, somehow while keeping even in the air, then with a loud pop it was replaced by what looked like a missile, a big bulbous lump of metal with a few thrusters on the back that immediately lit up and started to roar.

You might want to move, you are within the outer edges of the blast radius.

I blinked. “Oh fuck,” I said as I slammed the door shut and pushed myself back into my seat.

Gomorrah didn’t wait around, she put her foot down and the Fury shot forwards. “Atyacus, can you put ground zero on the main screen?” Gomorrah asked.

Most of the screen before us switched from a view of the skies ahead to the forest behind and below us, the entire thing fading back as we sped off.

“We’ve got to be safe now,” I said a few seconds later, we were a good four kilometres away.

“Probably,” Gomorrah said without slowing us down.

Before I could come up with a rebuttal there was a flash. A single, thin pillar of light shot out of the ground near the hive and into the sky, like a beam of sunlight through the clouds, but exactly the opposite.

“Is that it--”

The ground wavered. It was as if the world was a still puddle and someone had just dropped a rock into it. The earth bucked down, then trees and rocks all around rippled.

The explosion itself followed a millionth of a second later, a huge uneven blast of expanding black smoke that was swallowed up by a growing wall of white smoke and angry fire.

I winced as the shockwave caught up with us. The Fury weathered the turbulence for a couple of seconds until Gomorrah seized control of it and levelled us off.

When I looked back, there was a growing misshapen mushroom of black smoke slowly crawling its way into the sky. The clouds above were parted from their endless rainy state, and a few white rings were still lingering above.

“Huh,” I said.

“That was... beautiful,” Gomorrah said.

I started to giggle. “I need that footage, Gomorrah.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll save it,” she said. She still sounded a little awed.

“Oh fuck, how close was the facility to the blast?” I asked.

Gomorrah gestured through the air, and the same map we’d been using opened up on screen. It was centred over our position, but it was easy enough to guess the distance to the facility. It was... maybe five kilometres away from the blast?

Would that be enough?

The projected likelihood of civilian injury was very low.

“Yeah, and I’m sure the shockwave was just a light breeze,” I said.

The bomb used a directional warhead, it focused the vast majority of the explosive force upwards.

I hummed to myself, then pointed to the dissipating mushroom. “We should do a fly-by, check out the site before heading over to the facility. I want to see if we accidentally pulped anyone.”

Gomorrah nodded and we turned around to head back.

The pillar of smoke around the site of the explosion was still thick and heavy, with a few glowing twists of fire occasionally grasping out of it.

Still, the edge of the explosion was relatively clean. Every tree within two hundred or so metres was knocked down, and some were clearly on fire, but it looked like the fire was pretty weak.

As Gomorrah circled the edge of the crater, I could make out glimpses past the smoke. It was pretty clear that there was now a big conical hole missing under all that smoke. A few chunks of rock and other detritus had been ejected up and had come down sprinkled across the area too, adding to the fun.

The car’s ventilation kicked itself up a notch, and yet it still felt warmer as we flew around.

“That’s a job well done,” I said.

“Let’s just see if anyone got hurt from it before patting ourselves on the back,” Gomorrah said as she pulled us out of our turn and headed towards the facility.

Incoming call. It’s from Laserjack.

“Put him on,” I said.

A screen opened in my augmented vision, with a smiling Laserjack staring at the camera from what looked like a nice minimalist office. “Hello, Stray Cat,” he said.

“Hey, Laserjack,” I said.

“Quick question. Did you just nuke Canada?”

“Technically no,” I said.

He nodded. “Oh good. Could you explain that technically part? Because a lot of sensors just went off, and the satellite imagery that I’m getting sure looks mushroom-like from here. No big burst of radiation though, so I imagine that the bomb you used really wasn’t nuclear.”

“You’ll be happy to learn that we took care of a hive,” I said. “It was a small one, so we figured the easy thing to do would be to blow it up.”

Laserjack leaned back a bit, thought, then gave in and nodded. “Fair enough. Usually we’d discourage that kind of methodology for destroying a hive. It might spread some bio-contaminants far and wide, which might start new hives, but it’s usually mostly effective. And right now, I don’t think we have the luxury to look down on non-traditional methods.”

“Thanks?” I tried.

“Well, keep up the good work! Though, in the future, maybe send us a text before not-nuking anything?”

“I can’t send you a text for every bomb I use, that’s just unreasonable.”

He shrugged. “Every bomb over... say, a hundred tons of TNT in yield?”

“That’s better,” I said. “See you around Laserjack. I think I’ll be taking the evening off to get some other work done in the city.”

“Sure. I imagine tomorrow will be a much busier day for all of us, so getting what you can get done now out of the way is only wise.”

I nodded along. “See you around, bud.” With that, I closed the line. “He didn’t seem too annoyed,” I said.

“I imagine it’s generally unwise to be annoyed by people with lots of high-yield explosives,” Gomorrrah said.

“Ah, come on, he’s a samurai too. I bet he’s got a trick or two up his sleeve. So, facility next? Then I really do want to check up on some things in the city.”

“Sure. I think I might slip around and help where I can for the rest of the day. I don’t exactly have big plans.”

“Oh, well in that case, wanna eat at my place tonight? Bring Franny, we’ll make an evening of it!”

***